Java Network And Cryptography Resources

I first taught myself Java in my senior year of college for the GPS navigation project I did for my final project in my undergraduate degree. Since then I found a keen interest in the Red5 project which is developed entirely in Java. Since starting with Red5, I have really come to appreciate Java after overcoming its immense learning curves and complexities. I have always developed on Windows, but deployed on Linux. The power of Java and the virtual machine allows this transition of code to happen in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days. As the previous entry alludes, I have been tackling some challenges concerning encryption and socket based programming. I am doing all of this in Java due to its portability, and I wanted to provide resources for beginners that I think may help a great deal. It will help to explain what I am trying to do.

I want to transfer encrypted multimedia files over sockets securely using the best encryption technology possible. These encrypted file transfers must also incorporate features like data integrity checking and re-transfer if necessary.

If you are a slow, but curious learner like me; the absolute best thing you can do is get right into the code and get very confused. You will quickly find that encryption doesn't seem to have a lot of documentation. By far the absolute best resource I found starting out was the Avirans Place article on Assymetric encryption.

After you get into the code a bit and are familiar with the terms, the Security Now podcasts will be without a doubt the best resource you can find to explain in detail what you have just tried to implement. The following are excellent resources:

Security Now Ep 31 Symmetric Stream Ciphers
Security Now Ep 33 Symmetric Block Ciphers
Security Now Ep 34 Public Key Cryptography
Security Now Ep 35 Cryptographic Hashes
Security Now Ep 37 Crypto Series Wrap-up

After listening to all of these you will have a firm understanding of what the heck is going on.

I was having trouble with key sizes in Java and a lot of the socket examples I found online were using while loops instead of threads; which indicated to me that I needed some professional resources. I ended up purchasing "Beginning Cryptography with Java" by David Hook and "TCP/IP Sockets in Java" by Kenneth L. Calvert and Michael J. Donahoo. I have only read the intro and first chapters of both books so far. With the crypto book I was able to pick up a few tricks right away. The TCP/IP book proved less helpful in the opening entries.